ABSTRACT
This book has been a journey through understanding how trauma is lived. It has also been a reflection on how this phenomenological understanding can help us and our communities to heal. Trauma is deeply personal and individualised. It also has the capacity to connect a diversity of people through a shared experience. At the beginning of this book, I shared the story of my friend’s experience of trauma. Amira showed me two things. First, her unique experience of suffering is tied to her own story. Second, she also recognises a connection between her trauma and others who have experienced their own pain. Trauma, I have argued, needs to represent this multidirectional experience (Rothberg 2009) that includes an experience of the material body and consciousness, while also including our social relationships and the collective experience of being human that emerge out of responding to the places that we live in.
